


Character Sketch

by puella_nerdii



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Artists, First Meetings, Gen, Mission Fic, Pre-Star Wars: Rebels, Team Dynamics, explosions for great justice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:49:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_nerdii/pseuds/puella_nerdii
Summary: Hera and Kanan hire Sabine for one job. Sabine volunteers for another.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Redrikki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redrikki/gifts).



Sabine leans against the wall of the spaceport, her sketchpad propped up on her lap. It’s still a little early to head down to the docks and see if any outbound ships will take a passenger who’ll work for her fare. Until then, she needs something to do with her hands. At least she managed to smuggle her pad off Mandalore with her. Stars know what the Imperials did to her paints. They’ve probably scraped every trace of her out of the alleys, blanketed the walls in dull, lifeless gray. Her stomach lurches. By now, they might have traced the art back to her, and held it against her family..

She takes a steadying breath, forces her hands to unclench. Stop thinking. Start drawing.

Sabine starts with a rough outline of the spaceport, the long convex lines of the outer walkway and the careful symmetry of the doors. Enough people pass by her to populate the sketch: a Rodian dragging two children behind her, a protocol droid with a discolored chestpiece, a lanky human adjusting the strap on his pauldron.

The man’s leaning against the wall, arms crossed over his chest and one foot propped up. The pose is all angles, but it;s not ungainly. She takes a few moments to get the general shape down, then peers at his face. His eyes are closed, but he’s definitely not sleeping. There’s a slight crease between his eyebrows, and a certain set to his jaw that takes a few hard lines to capture. It’s not tension, exactly. It reminds her of a soldier standing at the ready, even if the man’s posture is far from military regulation.

He opens his eyes, catches hers. Sabine freezes, and can’t say why. 

A Twi’lek walks past. The man unfolds from the wall to join her.

Sabine sketches her, too. Twi’leks and humans aren’t an uncommon sight these days, but the human’s the one inclining his head to her as she speaks, taking up position just behind her shoulder. She’s definitely not a slave, then. She pushes a pair of pilot’s goggles further up on her head, and her lekku sway just a little. Sabine pencils in a couple of curved strokes to capture that motion, but none of them come out right.

The man taps the Twi’lek on the shoulder. Now she’s looking at Sabine, too. They’re both heading over. Sabine’s legs lock up. Are they bounty hunters? Well, they’re not marching through the halls like they own the spaceport, so maybe not. Maybe she’s just done a bad job of not staring. 

The Twi’lek glances down at the pad in Sabine’s hand. “Oh! You’re an artist.”

Sabine blinks. It’s been a while since she’s heard that without any sneering condescension tacked onto the end. 

“I hope it’s not too rude to ask if I can see what you’re working on,” the Twi’lek says.

“Not rude, but it’s not a finished piece or anything. It’s just sketches.” Sabine flips the pad around to show her. 

The Twi’lek bends down to study it, lekku flopping forward, and murmurs -- appreciatively, Sabine thinks. “Kanan, come here, she’s got you down perfectly!”

The man -- Kanan -- wanders over, arms folded again. The corner of his mouth quirks up a little when he sees the sketch, and some of the tension in his shoulders eases. “Yeah, she did.”

“Do you sell your work,” the Twi’lek asks, “or is this just for you?”

Sabine scratches the tip of her nose. “Neither, kind of? Most of my finished work is --” She trails off. What’s a tactful way to put it? “Um, public installations. And they’re not exactly done on commission.”

The Twi’lek rests a finger on her chin, looking thoughtful. “So you’re more of an underground artist, then.”

“Hera,” Kanan says, “we should get going.”

“We will,” Hera calls over her shoulder, then turns back to Sabine. “How much do you know about Lorne Carloth?”

 _I can list all of his work in chronological order, or by planet of origin, or by period of artistic development,_ she doesn’t say, because she does know how much is too much, sometimes. “I’m a big admirer of his.”

“Could you tell his work apart from a copy?”

“Oh, definitely. Lorne Carloth’s known for working with found material on the planets he visits, but he always works in some of the pigments from his homeworld, and they’re -- uh.” She clears her throat. “Why?”

Hera smiles. “Why don’t we talk about that over a cup of kaf?”

***

It’s a simple enough job, on the surface. Hera and Kanan have been hired to pick up one of Carloth’s pieces and deliver it. The buyer’s leery about getting scammed, though, so he’s asked them to verify the work’s legitimacy. Sabine stretches the truth a little about her experience with forgeries, but hey, between spoofing code and studying art, she figures she’s got the right skillset. Plus, it’s a respectable cut of credits, and it’s not bounty hunting.

And the ship is _something else_.

She has a sleek symmetry that Corellian manufacturers would drool over. Frankly, Sabine’s drooling a little, too. She must have started her life as a light freighter, but it doesn’t seem right to refer to her as one now, not with those top-notch engines jutting out back and that aft-mounted shuttle. The cockpit sparkles in the spaceport’s harsh light, and oh, what Sabine wouldn’t give to hop in it. She’s pretty sure she won’t be allowed anywhere near the controls, sadly. Which is a real shame, considering all the turns she must be capable of.

“Welcome to the _Ghost_.” Hera’s beaming like a proud mother -- or how Sabine assumes proud mothers beam, at least; she doesn’t have much personal reference for that. “She’s fast, responsive, reliable, and she packs a punch when she needs to.”

Sabine counts the gun turrets, whistling. It’s definitely more firepower than most light freighters carry, even ones that make the rounds on the Outer Rim. She rests her hand on the _Ghost_ ’s hull. Solid durasteel plating, and the slight matte of the surface plus the slick finish screams nightshade coating to her. Most pilots on the Outer Rim smuggle, but this setup suggests that it’s Hera and Kanan’s main line of work, not just something they do on the side for an extra credit or two. 

The cargo hold is bright and spacious, with no obvious hollow panels or hidden compartments. Sabine’s estimation of Hera goes up another notch when she sees the clean gleam of the walls and floors and tidy stacks of crates. She’s known enough smugglers who don’t bother to give their ships a good scrubbing between jobs, and so many of those stains raised questions she never wanted answered. An astromech wheels across the balcony, and Hera calls up, “Hey, Chop!” To Sabine, she adds, “C1-10P, but we all call him Chopper.”

“Who’s ‘we all’?” Sabine asks.

“Right now, Kanan, Chopper, and me,” Hera says. “We usually have another crew member, Zeb, but he’s on shore leave right now.”

Sabine nods. “Do you usually do delivery work?”

“Most of our jobs involve getting something from point A to point B, so in that sense, yes.” Hera ascends the ladder with ease and leads Sabine down a narrow hallway. “You’ll be staying in the room to your right, the cockpit’s at the end of the hall, you can get to the _Phantom_ \-- our shuttle -- with that ladder, but I don’t think we’ll need it on this run. The break room and ‘fresher are behind you. Let’s see, what else...my quarters are off to the side over there, and Kanan’s --”

Hera stops in front of an open door, and Sabine can’t help but peek in.

Kanan is kneeling on the floor, his hands resting in loose fists on his thighs. His back is straight but not stiff; aligned, Sabine thinks, like the framework of a sculpture. If his chest rises and falls, it’s too slow and measured to see. For all that she’s tried to capture motion in her art, she’s never given much thought about depicting stillness. Not lifelessness, but -- whatever the right word for this is. The hair on the back of her neck prickles, and for all that her eyes are closed, she could swear Kanan’s looking right at her.

“Whoops,” Hera says, and tries to palm the door closed, but Kanan’s already cracked an eye open.

“I hope I haven’t missed anything,” he says.

“Just showing Sabine the _Ghost_.” Hera curls her fingers around the doorframe. “You can go back to meditating. We didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“If I didn’t want to be interrupted, I should’ve remembered to close the door.” Kanan tugs his ponytail into place. “And besides, better you than Chopper.”

“Just because he shocked you that one time,” Hera begins, with a twinkle in her eye that Sabine knows way too well from her time teasing her instructors.

Kanan snorts. “ _One_ time. Yeah. Right. Did you warn Sabine about Chopper?”

“I’m sure Chopper and Sabine will get along fine,” Hera says, leaning on the doorway so she’s half-in and half-out of Kanan’s room. It casts her right side into shadow. “Chopper can be, well, particular, but he’s perfectly capable of behaving himself with a colleague.”

“That’ll be the day,” Kanan mutters, although a series of whirrs and alarms from down the hallway mostly drowns him out. Chopper speaks a dialect of Binary that Sabine’s not as familiar with, but she catches enough to get the gist.

“Well, you’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see,” Hera tells Sabine. “We’re not the biggest ship in the galaxy, but we get along with what we have.”

“I can tell,” Sabine says. She ignores the knot hardening in her stomach. It’s...nice. Really. Hera and Kanan seem to read the slightest shifts in each other’s posture, the smallest glances. Even the bickering over Chopper feels like a well-worn routine, like a holo they’ve seen often enough to quote from memory. She thinks of Ketsu. She then very deliberately _doesn’t_ think of Ketsu, and voices the first not-Ketsu-related thing to come to mind. “Where are the gunnery stations.”

“Above the cockpit.” Hera gestures towards each. “But I’m hoping we won’t need them for this run.”

Sabine hesitates, scratching the back of her heel with the tip of her boot. “Um. Well, I’m not a bad shot. Just in case.”

“Good to know,” Hera says: thoughtful, not dismissive. “Hang on, Chop says he’s finished the jump calculations. I’m just going to check them over. No, I _do_ trust your work,” she adds, after Chopper expresses his irritation with a series of low beeps. “Better safe than sorry, that’s all.”

As Hera heads to the cockpit, Sabine takes another look around. The breakroom has a dejarik board. Do Hera and Kanan play? She sits down opposite the display, powers it on. The projected pieces assemble themselves in neat rows -- and something under the table crackles. Crouching down, she checks under the table. There’s a receiver underneath. A few bursts of sound hiss from the speakers, but they’re too faint to make out. Sabine adjusts the volume.

“ _I-578B, this is I-463C. No irregularities found in departure schedules from Dock 2B, over._ ”

Sabine cranks the volume all the way down, shoves the receiver away from her, and scans the hallway as fast as she can. Nobody appears to have heard anything. Good. That was an Imperial frequency. Not one of the more secure channels, she’s fairly sure; she could probably break the encrypts in a few minutes. Apparently someone else on the ship can, too. And apparently it’s worth their while to eavesdrop on Imperial communications -- or to reach out to Imperials, if they have to.

She rakes her fingers through her hair. _Calm down_ , she reminds herself. Of course smugglers would want to listen in on Imperial patrols, in case they needed to know where not to be when the Fleet decided to conduct a sweep. It doesn’t mean that Hera and Kanan are ISB informants or Empire-sanctioned bounty hunters or -- or whatever conspiracy she cooks up next. She’s nowhere near Mandalorian space, if the sector around her home can even be called _Mandalorian_ space anymore. She’s kept her head down since she left, she hasn’t used any of the detonators she brought with her, she hasn’t even tagged any Imperial buildings. She’ll be fine, as long as she keeps skulking around. And skulking around is a terrible way to live. But what’s the alternative? Her, alone, against the Empire? It’s not like people are hanging DOWN WITH THE EMPIRE banners on any world Sabine knows of. People might not like how they’re living, but at most they’re grumbling to each other in cantinas about taxes. Push back any more than that, and -- well, she saw what happened on Mandalore. It’s wrong, and she hates it, and she can’t _do_ anything. She slams her heels into the ground, sinks her face into her hands.

A door slides open, and Sabine hears footsteps drawing closer. “Is everything all right?” Hera asks.

Sabine forces herself to sit up straight, smile. “Yeah. Just kind of tired. Mind if I take a nap while we’re in hyperspace?”

“Not at all,” Hera says. “I’ll let you know when we’re close.”

***

The meetup location could be worse, Sabine decides. It could be an _abandoned_ warehouse on the edge of a vast forest, a good distance away from any decent landing pad. As it is, the warehouse is apparently still operational, just not open at this time of night. Sabine picks her way across the broken ground, resting her hand on her blaster out of reflex. She left her armor on the _Ghost_ \-- Hera did say it was supposed to be a friendly meeting, and there’s nothing friendly about a fully-armored Mandalorian -- but she couldn’t help slipping a couple of detonators into her bag for insurance. As far as Sabine’s concerned, paranoia pays.

“We’re looking for Gracchus,” Hera tells her and Kanan. “He’s a Rodian male, average build. He said he’d be waiting outside for us with the sculptures, but I don’t see him here yet.”

Kanan glances at the warehouse, starkly silhouetted in the starlight. “He couldn’t have scheduled a meeting in the daytime?”

“To the best of my knowledge, Lorne Carloth hasn’t endeared himself to the Empire lately,” Hera says. “I guess a lot of art dealers don’t want to come off like they’re promoting his work.”

Sabine racks her brain, but can’t remember any recent incident of Carloth ticking the Empire off. Maybe he annoys the Empire just by existing. She knows how Imperials feel about unauthorized decorating, and she doesn’t think Carloth’s ever applied for a permit in his life.

“That must be him,” Kanan says as a man with pebbled green skin stumbles towards them, a hovercrate in tow.

Hera steps forward. “Gracchus? I’m Hera. We’re here for the sculptures. Our buyer wanted an expert to verify that they’re the real thing -- that won’t be a problem, will it?”

Gracchus splutters about his impeccable reputation in a mix of a few languages, but Sabine’s only half listening. She manages not to run towards the crate, which is no small feat. She does push the lid off as fast as she can, though.

She’s seen _Wroshyr_ in holos and stills, but seeing it in person takes her breath away. _Wroshyr_ ’s a newer piece of Carloth’s, but apparently it’s sparked more cantina brawls than the rest of his work combined. Carloth’s never said whether he managed to slip past the Imperial blockade and onto Kashyyyk, or whether he found the wood of the wroshyr tree from an off-planet vendor. Either way, he let the wood keep the shape he found it in. A lot of critics booed him for sticking a branch in a box and calling it art. Now that she’s close enough to touch it, though, Sabine sees how wrong they were. There are thousands and thousands of tiny shapes etched into the branch. At a distance, it looks like bark. Up close, Sabine sees how Carloth’s worn and weathered part of the wood to make it look thicker, and that what appear to be knots and whorls are thin metal charms pressed into the sculpture’s surface. Holos can’t do this justice, can’t capture how it’s painstakingly crafted the illusion of something so ordinary -- unless you stop to engage with it.

She pulls out her scanner, and sure, a quick sweep shows all the right chemical composition in the metal and paint, but honestly, she knew it was Carloth’s work from the moment she set eyes on it. She’d stake her helmet on it.

“-- Sabine?”

Sabine blinks, remembering that the rest of the world exists. “Oh. Right. It’s real. It’s _amazing_.”

“We can admire it on the ship.” Kanan’s scanning the sky, his frown deepening. “Something’s not right. We shouldn’t stick around.”

Sabine follows his gaze, but there’s no movement in the trees. She shrugs. “If you say so, but I don’t see --”

“It’s not what I see, or hear,” Kanan says. He hesitates. “I can’t explain it more than that. I’m sorry. All I can ask you to do is trust me.”

“We do trust you, Kanan,” Hera says, inching closer to the gangplank. “Gracchus, did anyone follow you here?”

“I invited no one else here, I promise you!” Gracchus says.

Kanan shakes his head. “You might not’ve invited anyone, but I think they invited themselves. Get down!”

Sabine hits the ground, and something strikes a patch of dirt way, way too close to her face. She looks up. Bursts of blaster fire fly over her head. Kanan’s rolled away from the crate; when he stops moving, he plants a knee on the ground and shoots someone straight in the gleaming white chestpiece. Stormtroopers. Great. 

Hera’s halfway up the gangplank, firing into the darkness. “Chopper, get the _Ghost_ ready to go!” she shouts. “Sabine and Kanan, get that crate!”

“You go, I’ll cover!” Kanan says.

Sabine shakes her head. “Trust me, I can lay down a little more firepower!”

Thankfully, Kanan doesn’t ask questions. He sprints back to the crate -- stars, he’s fast -- and gives it a good shove. More Stormtroopers are emerging from the tree line, blasters out. Sabine reaches into her pack, activates two of her detonators, and hurls them with all the force she can muster. The pink smoke goes off first, and she can picture the Stormtroopers skidding to a halt, staring. That’s when the second explosion hits, ripping a furrow into the ground. Sabine grins. She _really_ likes that design.

Behind her, Kanan calls, “You were right!”

Sabine knows not to wait around too much longer. She runs after Kanan, taking a few pot shots over her shoulder on the way. Gracchus, she notices, has made a beeline for the warehouse, but he doesn’t seem hurt. _Wroshyr_ hasn’t been singed either, from what she can see. Thank goodness. 

The gangplank hisses shut behind them just as Sabine asks, “Is this what you call an uneventful pickup?”

“Not anymore,” Kanan says. “Hera, do we have any company in the sky?”

“I see three fighters coming in north-northwest,” Hera calls from the cockpit. “Sabine, do you remember where the gunnery stations are?”

“Um. Yes?”

“Good. Take the rear gun. Kanan --”

“I know the drill,” he says, and takes off down the hallway.

Sabine’s legs have carried her to the rear gun before her mind really catches up to what’s going on. She’s being fired on, by Imperials, because of two people she’s known for a couple of rotations, neither of whom brought up this particular scenario as a possibility when they hired her. And they’re prepared for this. Maybe they didn’t expect Imperial company today, but Kanan said _I know the drill_ , like this is a routine occurrence.

On one hand, Sabine didn’t expect to be shot at today, and she’s not thrilled.

On the other hand, she now gets to shoot back.

The _Ghost_ zooms past the fighters and breaks into the atmosphere. Here wasn’t kidding about the _Ghost_ ’s maneuverability; she weaves right through the enemy fire, outstripping the enemy fighters with ease. The targeting computer’s still locked on to one of their pursuers in spite of all the acrobatics, so Sabine takes a moment to get a shot off. She scores a clean hit on one of its engines, and the enemy fighter spirals off, black smoke trailing behind it. Not too bad, considering how long she’s been out of practice.

“Nice shot,” Kanan says over the comm.

“We’re almost clear,” Hera says. “Chopper, get the hyperdrive ready.”

As the _Ghost_ breaks free of the planet’s orbit, Hera reverses direction at the last moment. The enemy fighters don’t turn as quickly and end up overshooting, almost to one of the planet’s moves. Then starlines start to streak across the viewport, and they leave normal space behind.

“That was close,” Kanan says. “Too close. The Empire must’ve gotten to Gracchus before we did.”

“At least we got what we came for,” Hera says.

“About that.” Sabine clears her throat. “Anyone want to explain what just happened?”

***

“We never meant to place you at risk,” Hera says. The three of them have decamped to the break room, and they’re sitting around the dejarik table. Kanan’s resting his chin on his folded hands, his elbows on his thighs. Hera’s holding a cup of kaf, turning it this way and that in her hands as she talks. Sabine leans back into her seat. She still hasn’t uncrossed her arms. 

“We thought Gracchus might be trying to sell us a forgery,” Hera continues. “We didn’t think he’d tipped off the Empire.” She sighs. “But I should have taken that precaution, and I didn’t, and I put you in danger.”

“I’ve been in plenty of danger in my life,” Sabine says. “I don’t mind that part. I _do_ mind not being told the truth.”

Kanan and Hera exchange glances. “We told you what you needed to know, at the time,” Hera says. “We thought we’d put you -- or ourselves -- in more danger if we shared the rest.”

“If you didn’t trust me,” Sabine snaps, “you shouldn’t have hired me.”

“We did trust you. And we still do,” Kanan says. He sits up straighter, braces his hands on his knees. “Hera, we have to tell her. Enough so she understands.”

Hera’s smile is lopsided, like an uneven brushstroke. “You’re right.”

“Hey, sometimes it happens.”

Hera huffs out a brief laugh, squeezes Kanan’s shoulder, then turns her attention to Sabine. “Kanan and I are part of the Rebel Alliance.”

Sabine blinks. “The what?”

“I don’t think I need to tell you what the Empire’s done, and what they’re continuing to do.” Hera sets her cup down, gradually eases her fingers off it. “By now, they’ve dispensed with any pretext of democracy, and they’re ruling through fear and violence. There are beings all over the galaxy who defy the Empire every day, of course. Sometimes just by living.” Her eyes cloud, then clear again. “But some of us have decided to join together and defy them a little more actively.”

A thousand questions and remarks scramble for space in Sabine’s mind. Sure, her instructors at the Imperial Academy talked about planetary insurgencies and terrorist cells, but no one suggested that all those pockets of resistance were linked.

Then again, if they were, where was the Rebel Alliance when the Empire stormed Mandalore?

No, that’s a stupid question. Even if there was -- is -- some kind of grand Rebel Alliance, her people probably wouldn’t condescend to join it.

“How many of you are there?” she asks.

“Honestly, even if I were allowed to, I couldn’t tell you,” Hera says. “Most of us operate in small groups, and we don’t communicate much with other ground-level operatives. It’s safer that way.”

“Safer if someone’s caught, you mean.”

Hera’s gaze is unflinching. “I do.”

“But you’re not assembling an army. You’re not liberating planets. You’re not --” Sabine chokes off. “How can you defeat the Empire?”

“By feeding the people it tries to starve,” Hera says. “By sabotaging as many of its plans as we can. By letting people know they’re not alone.”

“They are,” Sabine says, quietly. She remembers the lights of Ketsu’s ship twinkling into nothing, the fires racing through the streets of Sundari. “Or if they aren’t, they will be.”

She doesn’t stick around for Hera’s response. They’ve given her a room. She can shut herself in it until they dock, and then she can go, and she can do...whatever she was going to do with her life before she met them. Whatever _that_ was.

***

Someone knocks on her door a few hours later. It’s just as well. Sabine’s been staring at her sketchpad, doodling the occasional aimless shape. “Come in,” she says.

Kanan enters, hovercrate in tow. Sabine stops slouching.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

Her chest aches. “ _Wroshyr_. Yeah. I got to see it. I hope whoever’s getting it knows what they have on their hands.”

“Why don’t you take another look at it?”

“I’m afraid I’ll decide to kidnap it if I look at it any more,” Sabine says. It’s not entirely a joke. “Or I’d drop it, and then I couldn’t live with myself.”

Kanan laughs, though. “You can touch it. I’m sure Carloth wouldn’t mind.”

“He’s pretty big on tactile appreciation,” Sabine concedes, and stops there before she goes into a ten-minute talk about Carloth’s position on art as interaction. Something about what Kanan said niggles the back of her mind, though. “You’re sure he wouldn’t mind? Why, do you know him?”

“Not that well, but we’ve talked,” Kanan says. “We’ve got a couple things in common.”

“Like what?”

He nudges the hovercart closer to her knee. “Take a look.”

Honestly, Sabine doesn’t have to be told a third time. She lifts _Wroshyr_ out of the crate with all the care she can muster. It feels sturdy, substantial; she can imagine this wood rooted in an ancient forest, unbent by age or storm. But instead of fissures in the bark, the indentations are deliberate, like deep brushstrokes or etched letterhead. It _looks_ organic, but only because the arcane symbols cover the entire surface, the only breaks between them as natural as sand dunes. She trails her fingers over the reliefs. There’s a flow to them that almost seems familiar, a pattern of starting and stopping that reminds her of wind rustling and fading --

\-- or of speech.

Sabine zeroes in on the delicate brushwork. The spacing between the symbols isn’t as even as she first assumed. They’re broken into chunks, some shorter and some longer. And certain symbols repeat more often than others: a spiky spiral that reminds her of a coiled fern, a hollow oval tilted to the side, a five-petaled flower. 

“It’s a code,” she says, half to herself. “The symbols, they’re not just designs, they’re a code.”

“I’m not surprised you figured it out,” Kanan says. 

She drags her attention away from _Wroshyr_ long enough to look at Kanan. “You knew?”

“Like I said, Carloth and I have a couple things in common. He’s been resisting the Empire longer than I have. Longer than almost all of us, maybe. But his work’s different than ours. Not any less valuable, just different.”

“He passes messages?” Sabine scratches the back of her neck. It’s not exactly _surprising_ that Lorne Carloth would be involved in a rebel movement, when she thinks about it, people always said part of why he worked on so many different planets was so the Empire would have to keep guessing where he was. Still, though. Lorne Carloth, smuggling rebel messages in plain sight, for anyone who knows to look.

“Sort of. This one’s a transcription of the Wookiee creation story, if I remember it right,” Kanan says. “The things the Empire did to Kashyyyk -- after that, one of Carloth’s friends asked him to make sure that the tales of the Wookiees wouldn’t be forgotten, even if there were no elders left to sing them. You can’t publish that through an Imperial channel, though, so Carloth decided to get the word out differently. Hang on.” 

Kanan taps one of the metal whorls three times, and the sculpture begins to groan.

No, not groan, Sabine realizes, growl, a low guttural sound that reverberates in her bones. There’s a cadence to it, a pattern of rising and falling pitch, and just because she doesn’t know the meaning doesn’t mean the meaning isn’t there. The message ends on a long, mournful howl, fading to barely a whisper in the end.

“That’s one of their elders reciting the story,” Kanan says. “The translation’s in Basic. Once you decode the symbols, anyway.”

“It’s.” Sabine swallows. The lump in her throat swells to the size of a probe droid. “It’s even more beautiful than I thought it was.”

“May I sit?” Kanan asks. Sabine nods. He perches at the edge of the mattress, his legs too long to bend neatly. “Carloth told me that if the Empire hates what he’s doing so much, then he’s doing something right. I think he is, too. And I think what he’s doing matters. With all that the Empire’s destroyed, there’s still so much it can’t take from us. Carloth understands that.”

“What did it take from you?” Sabine asks.

Kanan screws his eyes shut. “My home. My family. Everything I knew. For a while, I -- lost myself. Or I tried really hard to. But Hera found me, and reminded me what’s most important.”

Sabine scuffs her toes against the floor. The obvious question hangs in the air, but she doesn’t voice it yet. “I don’t know if the Empire took something from me, or if I gave it up.”

“Then get it back,” Kanan says. “It’s not too late.”

***

Hera’s in the hall when Sabine emerges from the room, still holding _Wroshyr_.

“We’re almost at our destination,” Hera says. “Thank you. For everything. It might not feel like it, but what you did means a lot to many people.”

“Kanan told me,” Sabine says.

Hera nods, as if to say _fair enough_. “I can give you an extra forty percent on top of what we initially agreed on after Kanan and I complete the sale. That seems fair for hazard pay.”

Sabine shakes her head.

Hera frowns, leans her shoulder against the wall. “I might be able to scrape fifty together, but I’m not sure how much higher I can go.”

“No. I mean, forty percent is fair, I just don’t need it.” Sabine smiles. It’s small and it doesn’t quite stay in place, but it mostly comes out how she wanted it to. “Maybe you can deduct it from my room and board instead?”

It’s Hera’s turn to look nonplussed. Sabine takes a deep breath, continues. “I’m a great slicer and marksman, I’ve been trained in infiltration and espionage, and if you remember when we met those Stormtroopers, I know my way around explosives. And I keep my room clean. Well, except for the paint.”

Hera holds her hand up. “I don’t doubt your qualifications at all. I just didn’t expect you to ask to sign on.”

“To be fair,” Sabine says, “I didn’t expect me to either.”

“Here’s to breaking expectations.” Hera offers her hand for Sabine to take, and Sabine grips it. “Welcome to the _Ghost_ , Spectre Five.”


End file.
